Hackers steal $4.2 million from cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue

Singaporean cryptocurrency exchange Bitrue has been hacked, with the perps making off with roughly $4.2 million worth of cryptocoins XRP and ADA. 

The incident happened at 1 a.m. GMT+8 on June 27, with the hacker exploiting a vulnerability in the company’s “Risk Control team’s 2nd review process to access the personal funds of about 90 Bitrue users,” the company said on Twitter. 

The hacker stole 9.3 million XRP and 2.5 million ADA coins in total, moving it to other exchanges. Bitrue says the attack was detected fast, and that the situation is now “under control.” The company aims to return 100 percent of the lost funds to users, and is reviewing its security measures and policies to prevent such incidents in the future. 

Bitrue is currently conducting an emergency inspection of the exchange, and hopes to bring back log in and trading functionality “as soon as possible.” Withdrawals won’t be available for a “slightly longer period,” the company said.

Security incidents at cryptocurrency exchanges aren’t uncommon. Just last month, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance, was hacked to the tune of $40 million. 

The attack comes in the middle of a strong bull run for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, with the total market cap of all coins more than doubling in three months; it currently stands at $345 billion according to CoinMarketCap. However, the price rise was stopped in its tracks late Wednesday, with the price of Bitcoin dropping by more than $1,500 in a matter of hours, following an outage at popular crypto exchange Coinbase. 

The price of Bitcoin currently stands at $12,176, a 3.14 percent decline in the last 24 hours. As for XRP and ADA, their prices are down 9.6 percent and 7.68 percent in the 24 hours, respectively.